Orcs Must Die! Released

As of yesterday Orcs Must Die! is officially out for both XBLA and Steam

Buy and be happy; don’t buy and be sad.

Timing and Spacing in Animation

In my opinion, timing and spacing are the two most important aspects in animation. Both go hand in hand, but are completely different concepts. These two principles help your animated actions show weight (or lack thereof); speed or slowness of movement; help emphasis arcs and paths of action; show slow in or slow outs versus even spacing; hard or soft accents. AND probably much more that I’m not listing, (I’m sure of it). Quite honestly, I mixed up and misunderstood these concepts for the longest time. So don’t make the same mistakes I did. Here are some quick definitions:

Timing – The number of frames an action takes to complete.

Basically how long or how short an action is. 8 frames or 12 frames? You have to make a decision that best suits the action your character is going to perform. (Generally speaking, a punch versus a jump; two completely different actions that will need different timing to animate correctly.)

Spacing – This is the gap or amount of “space” between one drawing and the next.

How big or small the gap dictates the speed of the action. If the gap is big, you have a fast movement, if it is small, you’ll have slow movement. The drawings may also overlap each other (which probably indicates a slow movement or a held drawing if the drawings are identical.)

Here is an animation I threw together using a set of three bouncing balls to show off these two things. The timing of the three balls are identical at 14 frames. The spacing of the three is what gives the the feel of three different balls.

Here is a another video that I animated in maya demonstrating the same thing. Just click this sentence to view. In this video all of the balls start and stop at the exact same time, the spacing is what varies the movement.

Orcs Must Die! Gauntlet Animatic

It’s story time on how Orcs Must Die! Gauntlet came to be. One of the art directors at Robot Entertainment asked me to storyboard some Orcs Must Die! (OMD) logo ideas. The requirements and direction was essentially keep it short; keep it simple; comedy via orc violence; get the OMD logo on the screen. Some other logo animations were already complete, but he wanted to look at different options, perhaps a different direction. Six seconds was the maximum length established from the completed logos. Because some artist time had already been spent creating a usable (and great!) logo the time frame for the one I would create was short: Not including storyboard time, this would be done (animation, render, sound, etc…) in a week with minimal effort from the art team; 3d animation and reused assets.

Of course, my mind started blowing up with ideas that didn’t fit within that requirement. (Thanks brain, you’re awesome.) So, I storyboarded those ideas over the next three working days. Unfortunately, I saw these as short animations rather than just a straight up logo, which is probably why we didn’t move forward with any of my ideas. As such, I was trying to tell a small story with some (2), and others do exactly what the art director wanted (3). I finished a total of five. As I said, none of them were chosen and we went with the already completed logo. One animatic/idea, for me, stood out above the rest (above). I wanted to see it to completion. You can view the final animation here.

That’s how Orcs Must Die! Gauntlet started out. Below are the other animatics I did that aren’t going to see any further work.

Gauntlet Gets GIFs

I made this nifty little gif animation of the looping portion of the Orcs Must Die! Gauntlet video. Right click the image to save. If you want a higher resolution version, download it here. Enjoy!